Are CRM and ROI DOA?

Angus Kidman
Friday, 05 January 2007 12:25

IT Industry - Market

It's hard to imagine a presentation on enterprise software without the concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) and return on investment (ROI) getting mentioned frequently. However, both terms have popped up in a study identifying the most annoying catchphrases used in marketing.

A survey by US recruiter the Creative Group of 250 advertising and marketing executives asked to identify "the most annoying or overused buzzword "singled out both CRM and ROI, along with such other perennial annoyances as "customer-centric", "break through the clutter" and "integrated solution".

This may prove that technology managers need to rethink their approach and adopt some new phrases, avoiding meaningless jargon such as "synergy" and "paradigm shift".

On the other hand, it may also prove that marketing types can't actually tell the difference between ridiculous empty concepts such as "outside the box" and "low hanging fruit" and notions such as return-on-investment, which can be defined and measured in a sensible way. Nonetheless, we'd advise against any further use of the phrase "delivering real business value", even though it didn't appear in the survey.